It was one of those classic strange-bedfellow alliances. When the New Unity Partnership (NUP), a consortium of five international unions, formed in summer 2003 (as first reported by The American Prospect in September 2003), it brought together three of labor's most progressive unions -- the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), UNITE (the clothing and textile workers union), and HERE (the hotel employees union) -- with two unions from the more conservative side of labor's spectrum: the Laborers and the Carpenters. Indeed, the Carpenters, having hosted several Labor Day events with President George W. Bush, was the only significant American union that boasted of its ties to Bush's decidedly anti-union administration.
What the five unions did have in common, though, was a commitment to organizing. In recent years, all five had substantially reallocated resources into organizing campaigns (the Carpenters created a sizable backlash among locals that had lost their autonomy). They came together with a hope often expressed by merging corporations: that the synergies created by joining forces would foster greater growth, in this case by creating more leverage in organizing drives. And they came together as a distinct pressure group within labor's house, urging the AFL-CIO to do more to foster organizing in a movement whose membership, as a share of the American work force, continued to shrink.
Since its founding in September 2003, the NUP fostered one significant organizing campaign (in the multi-service industry) and laid the groundwork for last summer's merger of UNITE and HERE. The NUP also started a discussion about labor's capacity to grow again and whether the structure of the movement actually inhibited growth -- a discussion that has recently swept the AFL-CIO and that may provide the basis for a challenge to the continuing tenure of AFL-CIO president John Sweeney at this summer's Federation convention.
The Prospect has learned, however, that on January 4 -- just as that discussion was reaching fever pitch -- the presidents of the NUP unions (SEIU's Andy Stern, the Laborers' Terence O'Sullivan, the Carpenters' Doug McCarron, and UNITE-HERE co-presidents Bruce Raynor and John Wilhelm) met in Washington and decided to disband the alliance.
“I think it served its purpose,” Raynor told the Prospect. “It sparked this great debate in the labor movement, which is what we wanted. Now, we want it to be an inclusive discussion, not an exclusive one. The list of unions calling for reform has expanded. Hopefully, the AFL-CIO now becomes the vehicle to reform the labor movement.”
The debate in labor was kicked into high gear just after the November election, with the SEIU's release of a position paper calling for: 1) a major AFL-CIO dues rebate to those unions with serious organizing programs in their core industries; and 2) merging the Federation's 58 member unions -- many of them too small to run real organizing campaigns -- into a more manageable 20. If adopted, the proposal would restrict the AFL-CIO to such core functions as politics and training organizers and would lead to a sizable reduction in Federation staff.
Stern's proposal was controversial and made more so by the fact that he paired it with a statement that the SEIU -- the Federation's largest union, with 1.6 million members -- might pull out of the AFL-CIO if change was not forthcoming. Only when the Teamsters came forth with their own proposal on December 8 -- similar in many ways to SEIU's but with language encouraging rather than mandating mergers -- did a wide range of unions begin to embrace the idea of rebating Federation dues to organizing and changing Federation rules to promote realigning unions by sector. (These developments are discussed in my article “New Labor?” in the February 2005 issue of Prospect..)
Raynor told the Prospect that he “was very encouraged by the [AFL-CIO] executive committee meeting on Monday,” January 10, at which the presidents of the Federation's largest unions discussed the Teamsters' and other proposals. “I was impressed with the commitment union leaders showed to making the necessary changes -- more than cosmetic changes,” he said. “There's a growing majority for substantive change.”
Sources close to the NUPster leaders say that the NUP itself had become an obstacle to change. “To some of the more centrist union presidents, the NUP poses a problem,” one union leader said. “They say Andy [Stern] is too radical, and, instead of dealing with the substance of the arguments, they just want to attack Andy and the NUPsters. Rather than enable these critics to point at Andy or the NUP, [the NUP presidents] decided to take the NUP off the table as an issue.” Some of these critics view Stern, Raynor, and Wilhelm as somewhat culturally exotic figures for labor leaders, though they are among the most successful labor leaders of their generation. All three are Ivy Leaguers and -- just as rare among union presidents -- made their mark in their respective unions by their successes as organizers.
Though the principal parties deny that internal tensions were a factor in the decision to dissolve the NUP, a number of union leaders and staffers say that Stern's mid-November announcement of SEIU's manifesto, his statements about leaving the Federation, and his unveiling of SEIU's union-reform website (unitetowin.org) took his NUPster colleagues very much by surprise. “It took a little while to patch that one up,” one non-NUP leader said.
In its brief existence, the NUP was instrumental in kick-starting one major organizing campaign in the multi-service sector (an industry that provides food and cleaning services in ball parks, cafeterias, and the like that is dominated by such global corporations as Sodexho, Aramark, and Compass). A joint SEIU-UNITE-HERE organizing campaign began at Sodexho last year. Similar plans, involving all the NUP partners, to exert leverage on real estate investment trusts -- and, thereby, to organize both construction sites and the offices and hotels that are built on them -- have yet to yield concrete results.
But the unions of the NUP can claim credit for advancing ideas about labor reform that have moved to center stage in today's debate over the future of unions. Two of their presidents -- Wilhelm and O'Sullivan -- are mentioned as possible candidates to run against Sweeney on a reform platform, though neither has done anything to indicate he wants to be a candidate. It's still too early to know extent of the NUP's legacy.
Harold Meyerson is Editor-at-Large of The American Prospect.
